Israel fumes as U.N. secretary-general leaves Hamas off sexual violence blacklist

"Foreign Minister Israel Katz accused United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres of standing ‘shoulder to shoulder with the rapists and murderers of Hamas’ for declining to include the terror group in a report published Tuesday on organizations suspected by the UN of committing acts of sexual violence during conflict.

The document, titled ‘Conflict-related sexual violence,’ and published as a ‘Report of the Secretary-General,’ noted there is evidence that sex crimes were committed during the Palestinian terror group Hamas’s devastating October 7 attack on Israel, but did not specifically attribute responsibility to Hamas.

The ministry elaborated in the statement that Guterres ignored ‘the plethora of testimony and evidence that was collected and then included in the report of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict Pramila Patten.’

Patten’s report after her visit to Israel found that rape likely occurred during the Hamas attacks, and said there was convincing evidence hostages were facing sexual abuse in Gaza.

In his report, Guterres referenced Patten’s assessment, but noted that it, ‘not being investigative in nature and given its limited duration, did not draw conclusions on attribution to specific armed groups or determine prevalence of incidents of conflict-related sexual violence during and after the attacks of 7 October. Such a determination would require a fully-fledged investigation.’

Guterres, fumed Katz, refused to acknowledge Hamas’s responsibility for the grave sexual crimes that appear in the Patten report and to declare it a terrorist organization.

‘I am convinced that if the crimes of the Nazi regime had come up for discussion during his tenure, he would have refused to condemn them as well, if his political interests demanded that,’ the minister said in a statement published by the Foreign Ministry. ‘Guterres has turned the UN into an extremely antisemitic and anti-Israel institution, and his time in office will be remembered as the darkest in the organization’s history.’

On October 7, the Palestinian terror group Hamas led a massive cross-border attack on Israel that killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians, amid numerous atrocities.

Some 3,000 attackers burst through the boundary with the Gaza Strip to rampage murderously through southern Israel amid widespread gang rape, torture and mutilation of victims, according to numerous witnesses and robust evidence. Terrorists also abducted 253 people of all ages who were taken as hostages in Gaza.

Patten, the UN’s envoy on sex crimes during conflict, last month presented a report at the UN indicating that rape and gang rape likely occurred during the October 7 Hamas onslaught, that ‘clear and convincing’ evidence shows that hostages were raped while being held in Gaza, and that those currently held captive are still facing such abuse.

While Patten’s report ‘explicitly recognized the connection between Hamas’s October 7th attack and the horrific acts of sexual violence that were carried out in a systematic and deliberate manner,’ the ministry said, ‘the UN secretary-general refrained from attributing responsibility to the Hamas terrorist organization. This report constitutes a miserable and tragic testimony to the inadequacy of the functioning of the UN and its leader since October 7th, and it provides encouragement to terrorism and violence.’..."